Happening NOW: Red Crossbills on the Move

On a warm summer evening, sometime in mid-June, I found myself sitting on a dock in central Wisconsin, unwinding after a long day spent working on that state’s breeding bird atlas. Mid-sip on a Summer Shandy, that familiar sound met my ears: jip-jip-jip. Distant at first, they soon approached the lake, appeared as a duo overhead, and eventually departed south. I reached for my microphone (in the car), then my iPhone (who knows where), then resigned myself to accepting the fact that my eBird checklist would not be illustrated with sound recordings of those crossbills. I pondered on them for a moment—sharp-sounding, probably Type 3s, or maybe Type 2s? For more on 10 or so “types” of Red Crossbills, see this online primer from 2012:

Regardless of what type they were, this represented the first time I’d encountered any kind of Red Crossbill in this area, despite a couple thousand hours spent birding and surveying there.